Breifly, on why Victor Frankenstein bombed

With no passion and no wit the movie achieved only one terrible goal: completely destroying the nature of the creature in every sense possible.

As the voiceovers keep stating, then Igor (Daniel Radcliffe) in the desperate attempt at stopping his friend, it is the monster that will be remembered not the man. A feeble attempt at righting the common mistake we may make every day while talking about Mary Shelley’s work. Well, even this message carries little weight among the explosions and confusion, special effects that turn every viable emotional scene into an incoherent babble of fights and annoying sounds that instead of compelling just make the watcher lose focus and interest.

The main characters never really stick, we don’t really ever feel anything for the miserable (fake) hunchback and his circus tribulations, or love, friendship and moral ones for that matter. As good an actor as James McAvoy may be, this Frankenstein is a schizoid scientist version of a sum of already-seen portrayals, the crazy cop of Filth comes to mind, but that was an Irvine Welsh thing.

Little to no motivation behind any of them adds to the disappointment; they are all flat on the screen, going through the motions of being mere puppets instructed with lines of story that has no emotion, no purpose, no message. Specially deprecating is using Sherlock’s Moriarty aka Andrew Scott for such a minute and, frankly, silly role as the over-zealous, over-religious detective Turpin who knows all but we the public have no inkling whatsoever as to how.

One thing they referenced right calling the creature Prometheus as the book’s original title has always been “Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus”.